Honduran Woman Hanged Herself in Mexico

18 year old girl from Honduras was allegedly found by her boyfriend when he arrived home early in the morning from working the night shift.

She had used a length of rope to hang herself and he told first responders that her body was still warm when he found her, so he cut her down hoping she could be saved. He was incorrect and she was pronounced dead when the rescue workers arrived.

According to him, she had climbed up on the table that they used for preparing meals and stepped off after securing the rope to an overhead ceiling beam.

Her family insisted that the boyfriend strangled her and faked the suicide and they lobbied multiple times from Honduras (the death occurred in Mexico, where she lived with her boyfriend) to have a second investigation done, but the police in Tapachula asserted that they had been thorough and that there was no indication of foul play. Her death was ruled a suicide.

My partner and I interviewed the boyfriend, one of the first responders, and two of the young woman's aunts in an effort to establish whether there was any actual likelihood of foul play. Unfortunately, the police would not release additional photos to us, so for visual analysis of the scene, I could only work with two photos provided by the rescue worker (one in which her face was censored), one side angle photo taken by the boyfriend (which he allegedly sent to the aunt as proof because she did not initially believe the girl was dead when he called). It doesn't make for great scene analysis. The aunts' reactions are not altogether uncommon, especially in situations like this where the girl is living in another country and the family doesn't know anything about the boyfriend. It's pretty natural to want to blame someone other than your loved one in a suicide situation, but since they were trying to get this guy locked up for murder, it might have been nice if there was more investigation.

Anyway, her body was already cut down when the responders arrived. The boyfriend informed me that when he entered the room she was hanging in full suspension with her bare feet about half a meter off of the floor. She was wearing only her bra and pajama shorts and the bed had been slept in. He said he initially thought that her body was warm, but also that he could see her tongue was swollen and protruding fully out of her mouth, and that there was urine on her shorts and on the floor beneath her. He did not immediately equate either of those features with her being deceased, but he could not revive her so he felt she had died.

The rescue worker basically corroborated the condition of the body. He said there was no blood from her nares or her mouth (it is not uncommon to bite the tongue and produce bleeding when the tongue is swollen and protruding as hers was) and that there was no sign of physical injury on her person aside from the ligature mark. The room was messy and in disarray, but seemed to be regularly in that state as opposed to it looking like there'd been a fight. He also said that the police did look over the house and that he was not privy to those reports, but that he saw nothing in the area that would make him think it was not a suicide, for what that was worth.

The aunts in Honduras believed he killed her because she was pregnant and he didn't want the child. He informed me that she had only taken the pregnancy test a week earlier and that he was happy about the baby (he said she'd only missed one period and was about 5-6 weeks pregnant), as was she. He'd taken extra shifts at work to help with future expenses. He had no idea why she would want to kill herself, but he was quite distraught. The aunt I did most of my communication with tried to tell me that they had received the full autopsy report and that it proved she was murdered, but she refused to share the report with me and could offer no explanation why the Mexican authorities would ignore this 'proof', so I personally felt she was lying about having it at all. Autopsies are not mandatory in suicidal deaths in that part of Mexico and it is unlikely that the girl's family paid for an autopsy from Honduras, since they were running a GFM to have her body returned for burial.

All in all, my conversations with several parties and my amateur impression of the (unarguably low quality) crime scene photos did not give me any reason to doubt the boyfriend's story. The police and EMTs felt the same way, apparently. Hopefully no injustice was done here. Take the photos for what they are worth and draw your own conclusions.